Disconnect, cell by cell

“In order to serve you properly, we cannot take your order while on a cell phone,” the sign on the deli counter at Manhattan Bagel in Santa Monica says. It is not an angry sign; it is handwritten and unobtrusive. In fact, if you were on your cellphone, you might not notice it. By having a nothing conversation with your friend while purchasing lunch, you might not understand that this particular Manhattan Bagel franchise is fed up with trying to serve you, the customer, while you, the customer, are having a nothing conversation on the phone.

It’s not exactly a backlash, but there are a growing number of places around Los Angeles -- from sushi bars in the San Fernando Valley to Zipper, the modernist general store on fashionable 3rd Street in West Hollywood -- trying to get you off the phone.

Zipper’s sign went up four years ago, around the time a woman in the store was overheard saying into her cellphone: “I know you’re sleeping with her, and I’ve had it.”

“It’s a suggestion,” co-owner Steve Saden said of the sign on Zipper’s window: “Please be courteous to other customers by turning your cellphone off while shopping.”

Saden knows he’s swimming against the tide. This is L.A., after all, where that next call may be the one that changes your life forever. The County Museum of Art, for instance, bans cellphones in the exhibition rooms. But at the current Diane Arbus exhibit, a cellphone rang, and the woman who answered was heard to say: “I’m in an exhibit so I have to talk quietly.”

Scene from life in an urban mecca of connectivity?

“It’s just out and out rude,” said Brian Gruntz, the Manhattan Bagel owner who instituted the no-ordering-while-on-a-cellphone policy eight months ago, after experiencing a frustrating Saturday -- a line 60 deep, every third person on a cellphone.

“It’s so sad that our society has come to this point,” Gruntz said.

But what point, exactly, have we come to? Cellphone use has long since become a cliche of modern life -- so pervasive that it is beyond noticing. Of course, the commercials don’t show you how the cellphone is really used; instead, companies accentuate its sleek appeal (ooh, midnight blue!) and gadgetry (cameras, walkie-talkie functions) that make the cellphone the ultimate urban toy.

Meanwhile, the federal government has studied the health risks associated with exposure to radio-frequency energy, and a few states have regulated cellphone use while driving. But there’s also the public arena, and here, as usual, things are self-governing and strange. In L.A., nobody, for instance, is regulating this moment: the guy ahead of you in line at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, hands-free, talking to his invisible girlfriend about where to have dinner, a wire trailing out of his ear and an eighth of his attention devoted to the transaction at hand.

Is this some kind of breakdown in the public arena or just plain rudeness? Maybe it’s this: The more we blur the lines between public and private, work and play, serious and casual, the more everything becomes fair game. Go ahead, floss in the elevator. You’re busy; you can’t be expected to wait until you can find a bathroom. Bake a pie in your car if you can. Don’t worry if you cut me off in traffic without signaling; after all, you’re baking a pie. The world out there? It’s just a backdrop, as movable and transient as a fake skyline on a studio lot.

‘Floating worlds’

“I have quite a bit to say about cellphones,” Victor Thomlinson said the other week. He is 23, a “courtesy clerk” at the Whole Foods Market in Santa Monica, across the street from the Manhattan Bagel.

It was 3 p.m., a weekday, and Thomlinson left the checkout line where he was bagging. “It annoys every one of our cashiers and courtesy clerks,” he said of the pervasive cellphone use in Whole Foods.

Thomlinson’s cellphone rang (his girlfriend, he didn’t pick up). He told of the woman in the checkout line who was on her phone, left the line without excusing herself to retrieve an item, then returned -- to the wrong line.

Such disorientation is not surprising; we live, increasingly, not so much in cities or towns but in our own nameless “floating worlds,” in the words of Swarthmore College psychology professor Kenneth Gergen.

The cellphone is only one instrument of this floating world. And it should be pointed out that talking on the cellphone, like everything else, can reveal itself as an art. Like the young woman who walked into a 7-Eleven in the Fairfax District the other night. She was buying a case of beer and was somewhat breathtaking to watch. She got the beer, placed the beer on the counter, took out her debit card, handed over her debit card, received her debit card back, signed her receipt, picked up her beer and left.

She got into her car. All while maintaining a conversation, a phone cradled between ear and shoulder, her eyes never leaving that vague middle distance.

Still, here in the metropolis, there are people numb with rage at how acceptable cellphone use in public spaces has become -- how many people talk and order, talk and shop, talk and drive. The world has become a virtual living room, the cellphone eliminating the immutable reality of a physical environment. You and your phone, you are not in the checkout line at the supermarket or in the doctor’s office, filling out an insurance form. You are in your own private nonspace, an eternal sunshine of the spotless (thoughtless?) mind. Only instead of erasing memory you’re erasing what’s actually happening now. You’re erasing us.

“It’s a bit insulting to you, even if you’re anonymous, because it shows their hearts and minds are elsewhere and not in this swimming pool of life,” said James Katz, professor of communication at Rutgers University and co-editor of the book “Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance.”

“The presence of other people is arousing to you,” Katz said, “and yet the fact that they can’t interact with you is a frustrating situation.”

On the surface, these lines we’re standing in, together, are just loose configurations of strangers. Or are they? Public behavior is not necessarily random. We come together in parks and malls and coffee shops presumably because people are social animals. There is communication, despite ourselves. This can involve something as corny as teamwork in a Starbucks line. OK, you’ve never seen any of these people before. But you have some commonality.

“You’re in a goal-oriented line,” explained Gerald Goodman, a professor of psychology at UCLA who deconstructs communication, both spoken and unspoken. “You’re connected, you’re actually a temporary group. You’re members of that group waiting for coffee.”

Except for the team member on the cellphone.

“Within the group many are behaving by waiting in line and taking their turn, but this other person isn’t,” Goodman said.

This other person, he suggests, might even be said to be deviant. “They’re deviant because they’re not like the others.” By talking on the phone, he adds, “they may even be saying, ‘I’m important.’ ”

And you’re not.

Worldwide popularity

For all the talking we’re doing, the United States actually lags other countries in terms of cellphone use. In Taiwan, for instance, cellphones outnumber people, Katz said, and in Norway “99% of the population is a mobile phone subscriber.”

“We’re in the 65% category,” he said of Americans, adding that cellphone cameras and Web surfing are more prevalent in Japan, while much of the rest of the world is pecking away on SMS, otherwise known as “short message service.”

“Here, we’re talking,” Katz said. “I suppose you can choose your poison.”

“Perpetual Contact,” Katz’s book from Cambridge University Press, has chapter titles including “Bulgaria: Mobile Phones as Post-Communist Cultural Icons” and “Israel: Chutzpah and Chatter in the Holy Land.”

“There has even been an anecdote about an undertaker’s phone ringing inside a grave as the deceased was being put to rest,” it said in the Israel chapter.

“The unbearable loneliness of being with yourself, a lot of people can’t stand that,” Katz said, on the subject of Americans and their cellphones. “Before, they’d have to nervously tap their foot, now they can harness that nervous energy into bothering their friends.”

Which would explain why so many of the cellphone conversations we overhear are nonessential or trivial. In reality, we’re really not talking about that much.

It is, to be sure, a paradox: We use the cellphone to distance ourselves from the physical world, but then when we make contact often the first thing we do is identify where we are.

Thomlinson, the Whole Foods clerk, said mostly what he overhears is a version of the following provocative statement: “Yeah, I’m at Whole Foods right now, I’ll probably just get a salad, some wheat-free crackers.”

And yet, in the bubbles we inhabit, this passes as news -- lead news. “I’m in Whole Foods now!” Details to follow.